Hey guys!

Could anyone please help me discuss the following topics?

1) Properties of movements explained by Binding Theory (principles A and C)
2) Properties of reflexives explained by the principle A of the Binding Theory.

Thank you

That’s really useful infromation. From what you’ve written here, I guess I can say it all depends on what we want to express, whether for example a certain past action has some present relevance.
Jus to be sure – I created the following sentences and I’d be very grateful for your feedback, whether I chose the proper grammar forms.

1. I've watched one episode of the TV show you told me about yesterday and I found it really amusing. I've even picked up some really nice English expressions.

2. Yesterday I watched one episode of the TV show you had told me about and I found it really amusing. I even picked up some really nice English expressions. (= the time is implied - I learnt them yesterday)

Thank your for your response. However, I have some questions.

1. Can you give me an example of what you said here? I'm not sure if I understand.

1. Repetition of auxiliary and lexical 'have'. Because repetition is often avoided, "I've had to" might be less likely than, for example, "I've needed to".

2. Can you tell me what this minimal difference between "I've had" and "had to" is in this particular context I provided? I'll be more aware of which form to use in the future.

3. So, I can introduce some new information in the present perfect (as in example 3), and then switch to the past tenses (e.g. simple or continuous), and it will be correct grammatically and semantically?

Can you tell me if there's any significant difference between using the present perfect in the first example and the past simple in the second? Which form would be more commonly used in everyday situation?

1. I haven’t travelled much so far. The thing is, travelling has never been my priortiy - there’ve always been more important things I've had to spend my money on.
2. I haven’t travelled much so far. The thing is, travelling has never been my priortiy - there’ve always been more important things I had to spend my money on.

Also, I'd like to make sure if it's correct to combine the present perfect and the past simple in one sentence, like:
3. I've watched the film you recommended, and I really liked it.

In this particular example, I introduced the topic of conversation in the present perfect and then switched to the past simple, which is right I suppose.

The details are extremely complicated, and I don't know that I can explain them all here (or honestly that I completely understand all of my intuitions about these forms to list out every contingency).

As I've said, sometimes these are essentially interchangeable, as in your first example: "I didn't you know you live(d) in a houseboat".

In the second case, it would actually not be acceptable to say "I thought you are still on Holiday", because that would be counter-factual. Literally I suppose you could say "I thought you are", but that seems really weird to me, because there is some implicit negation here indicating a previous false assumption, that has now been corrected. The discourse function of "I thought [false statement]" is to emphasize the correlated idea "Now I know that actually [true statement]".

"I thought you work from home” (not "worked").

I'd prefer the past tense. But "work" (here) is better than "are still on holiday" (above) because it's not such a bad assumption: it's still possible that you usually work from home (sometimes, but not today), but it's not possible that you are currently on vacation while I am standing in front of you.

Given that, is it actually common in everyday speech to use the present tense after "I didn’t know…" or "I thought…" constructions?

No, it's not common with "I thought" because that is correcting a false statement.

With "I didn't know", that's different, because it's stating a true fact now, so the present tense might work. The complexity is that "didn't know" is in the past, so it would need to be a long ongoing event for it to work with present, or especially a habitual usage, something like "I didn't know you like pizza!", or maybe "I didn't know you are still sick". That works. But I'd prefer the past tense for both of those. (To my ears, the present is OK with habitual usage like "like pizza", but awkward with a real present tense like "are still sick"-- you can't have known that earlier, because it might have changed in the time since you "knew". But people might say that, just awkward.)

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For all practical purposes, this is essentially irrelevant. You'll be understood well. You might not understand some subtle nuances (like whether the speaker intends to express present-relevance), but that's rarely an important part of a conversation, and often redundant in context anyway.